Over 40,000 people die every year in road accidents in the United States. Many victims of car crashes are not killed instantly but rather succumb to their wounds at a later time. Often, the delay in receiving life-saving medical care is a contributing cause to the death. Occasionally, medical personnel arrive on the scene to treat the victims of car accidents, but are unable to reach the victims because they are trapped in a badly damaged vehicle. In side-impact collisions especially, the side doors of a vehicle are often crushed, rendering them unusable.
It is often the case that in order to dispense life-saving medical treatment, the occupants of a vehicle must first be extricated from the damaged vehicle. In the event that the doors of the vehicle have been disabled, or the vehicle is on its side, blocking the doors closest to the vehicle's occupants, another way must be found to remove the victims of a car crash.
Currently, emergency medical personnel must wait precious amounts of time for fire department or other rescue services to arrive with hydraulic tools, such as cutters, spreaders, rams, “Jaws of Life” and the like, in order to cut the vehicle open. These piston-rod hydraulic tools as well as other tools often require electricity, are heavy, and very expensive. The result is that it is time-consuming and often impossible to employ such devices, and the result is that lives are lost.
Much of the time, cutting tools are used to cut open the roof of a vehicle, since this is often the largest and easiest area of a vehicle to get to. The roof of a vehicle, when removed, also provides the easiest access to the vehicle's occupants.
Occasionally, after an accident, a person is not badly injured, but is nevertheless unable to extricate himself or herself through the damaged doors of a vehicle. This predicament often results in death when the car catches on fire, and the trapped occupant either suffocates or is burned to death.
Several attempts have been made to solve this problem with various kinds of vehicle hatches. All such inventions provide relatively small hatches, however, allowing only room enough for a single person to exit the vehicle at any one time. Additionally, depending on the type of accident, the placement of the relatively small escape hatch may prevent passengers trapped in the backseat of the vehicle from utilizing the hatch in order to exit the vehicle.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,495,731 issued to Sears shows an outwardly opening hatch that is hinged to the roof of a vehicle. This design poses several problems. Due to the relatively small size of the hatch, in the event that more than one person is in the vehicle, the delay caused by waiting for others to exit the hatch may result in death or serious injury, especially in the event that the vehicle catches on fire. Additionally, the hinges prevent detachment of the hatch, leaving the hatch in the area of the roof, which can often be an obstacle to removing a person from a vehicle. European Patent Application 89201170.1 also shows a relatively small, hinged escape hatch for a vehicle. Japanese Patent 4-212626 shows an escape hatch that is not hinged, but suffers from the same size limitations of the other prior art. In all of the prior art references, if the relatively small hatch area of the roof is damaged, which can occur in a rollover accident, it is possible that the hatch may be unusable.
A need therefore existed for an emergency roof detachment device for a vehicle having a detachable roof portion that comprises substantially the entire roof of a vehicle and is therefore capable of providing all of the occupants of a vehicle with the ability to easily escape from a disabled vehicle by initiating detachment of the detachable roof portion of a vehicle.